Thursday, April 27, 2017

Hello, everyone. I am Junwei Wang from China. It’s pleasant to be an ECRYPT-NET fellow and to receive funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions (MSCA).

The advent of content-protected applications and mobile payment systems in recent years motivates the exploration of a solution to protect sensitive information from being extracted under the white-box context in which the attacker has the power of control the whole process of the execution of software. Though some theoretical evidence reveals the fact that no generic obfuscator can be constructed to shield algorithms to be attacked, and all existed practical schemes has been broken, it is still interesting to investigate new schemes which can withstand all the existing attacks, and to propose and analyse a new attacking method which is more generic than the existing ones. I hope somebody has similar interest with me, then we can deeply explore this area together.

By the way, I am looking forward to meeting with you in Paris during EUROCRYPT.

Monday, April 17, 2017

I recently came across The Privacy Paradox project, a call by WNYC Studios to take part in a five-day-long challenge on defining what does privacy mean to yourself.

Amongst its best features, the process can be started anytime, by anyone, just by registering with an e-mail account. From that moment and during the five following days, you will receive a daily e-mail explaining you the topic addressed by that day's podcast, most of them finishing with an easy demand to the listener to reflect on the matter.

With the audio's length ranging from 11 to 15 minutes, and the topics from cryptography --with Bruce Schneier starring on the first episode-- to psychology, there is something on it for everyone, and at a very accessible level. I personally found the format very nice and entertaining, and it is maybe something to learn about when we talk about privacy with people not so interested in the topic.

Tuesday, April 11, 2017

Robustness for encryption schemes has been introduced in the context of public-key encryption in the work of Abdalla, Bellare and Neven.
In a nutshell, it states that a ciphertext cannot be decrypted under two different keys.
Later, their work has been extended, by taking into account the cases where the keys are adversarially generated.
The work of Farshim, Orlandi and Roşie studies the robustness in the context of symmetric primitives
under the incorrect usage of keys.
Roughly speaking, a key-robust scheme does not output ciphertexts/tags
that are valid with respect to distinct keys. Key-robustness is a
notion that is often tacitly expected/assumed in protocol design
--- as is the case with anonymous auction, oblivious transfer, or public-key
encryption.

To motivate the new notion, "consider the following protocol, for constructing a ${3 \choose 2}$-OT protocol using only ${3 \choose 1}$-OTs: the sender picks $3$ random keys $k_1,k_2,k_3$ and inputs the message $x_1=(k_2,k_3),x_2=(k_1,k_3)$ and $x_3=(k_1,k_2)$ to the OT. At the same time, the sender sends encryptions of his messages under these keys, i.e., sends $c_i=E(k_i,m_i)$ for $i=1..3$. Now the receiver inputs the index of the message he does not want to learn to the ${3 \choose 1}$-OT and learns all keys except $k_i$. Intuitively the fact that the messages are sent only once (encrypted) should guarantee that the sender's choice of messages is uniquely defined. However, consider the following attack: the corrupt sender inputs $x^*_1=(k_2, k^*)$ (instead of $x_1$) such that $D(k^*,c_3)=m^*_3$ with $m^*_3\neq m_3$ and $m^*_3\neq \bot$. This means that the receiver will see two different versions of $m_3$ depending on whether the receiver asked for the pair $(2,3)$ or $(1,3)$. (This attack is an example of input-dependence and is a clear breach of security since it cannot be simulated in the ideal world)."
In terms of the results, the new work considers "both notions where the adversary has control over the keys and notions where the keys are generated honestly. The strongest notion that is formulated is called complete robustness and allows an adversary to generate the keys used in the system. The work shows that whether the adversary is in control of the keys or not makes a significant difference, by giving separations between the notions. While previous work in the public-key setting also had to deal with adversarially generated keys that were also invalid, this is not an issue in the setting, since in the symmetric world keys are often bit-strings of some
pre-specified length and can be easily checked for validity. By focusing on
correctly formed keys it can can shown equivalence between complete robustness and a syntactically simpler notion, which we call full robustness."
Then, it is shown that full robustness composes well: any fully robust symmetric encryption when
combined with a fully robust MAC results in a fully robust AE scheme. Analogous composition results also hold for MAC-then-Encrypt and Encrypt-and-MAC.

One of the most interesting question is if "feasibility results for robustness in the public-key setting can be translated
to the
symmetric setting. This turns out not to be the case. The main reason for this is that in the asymmetric setting the public key can be used as a mechanism to commit to its associated secret
key. In the symmetric case, on the other hand, there is no such public information. It might be tempting to think that one can just commit to the secret key and append it to the ciphertext. Unfortunately this approach cannot be proven secure due to a circular key-dependency between the encryption and the commitment components. To give a provably secure construction, with the authors constructing appropriate commitments that can be used in this setting. This requires a right-injective PRG, that can be in turn based on one-way permutations. This
result relies on the one-time security of the MAC and its collision-resistance, which once again is based on right-injective PRGs."

Monday, April 3, 2017

You may remember Ralph's post on git basics from a little over a year ago. In this post, I'll share three things I've learned are possible (and practically painless) to do with git that go beyond the basic add, merge, push, and pull. Everything in this post is done from the command line.

Scenario 1

You're working on a project with others. These hardworking colleagues of yours just pushed a bunch of commits and you want to see exactly what they changed since your last commit.

What to do

Use git diff. Besides using it to show unstaged changes, you can also use git diff to show changes between any two commits. Suppose that after your last commit, your colleagues made 4 commits. To see the changes, use git diff HEAD~4 HEAD or git diff HEAD^^^^ HEAD. If you don't want to count how many commits there were, you can look up the abbreviated commit IDs (SHA-1 hashes in hex) using git log --oneline. Then, you could use something like git diff 54180a8 129ec44.

There's a lot more to git diff: you can use it to compare specific files, you can show differences at the word level rather than at the line level, etc. If you want to learn more about it, see its page on the git website. If you're working on LaTeX files, git-latexdiff is convenient: given any two commits, it will produce a PDF file showing the changes, with removed text striked through and in red, and added text underlined and in blue.

Scenario 2

You were in the zone, hacking away at multiple issues and successfully completing all of them. Well done, you! Wait—each issue should have its own commit...

What to do

Use interactive staging: use git add -p or git add --patch to add the file or files. Git will look at each file you want to add and split the changes into hunks. For each hunk, it will show you the diff and ask you what to do with it:

Stage this hunk [y,n,q,a,d,/,s,e,?]?

Here is the full list of options. They're pretty easy to remember, especially if you're a vi user who is used to navigating with HJKL.

y - stage this hunk
n - do not stage this hunk
q - do not stage this hunk or any of the remaining ones
a - stage this hunk and all later hunks in the file
d - do not stage this hunk or any of the later hunks in the file
g - select a hunk to go to
/ - search for a hunk matching the given regex
j - leave this hunk undecided, see next undecided hunk
J - leave this hunk undecided, see next hunk
k - leave this hunk undecided, see previous undecided hunk
K - leave this hunk undecided, see previous hunk
s - split the current hunk into smaller hunks
e - manually edit the current hunk
? - print help

git add -p is a powerful command that helps you keep your commits reasonably sized. It does require some care, though, since each individual commit should be consistent.

Scenario 3

You have to stop working, but you haven't finished fixing the issue you're working on.

What to do

You should do something because you don't want to have a dirty working directory.

Option 1: commit now, then use git commit --amend (introduced in Ralph's post) once you've finished what you were working on. git commit --amend is useful for a bunch of other things, like adding files you forgot to stage to a commit and fixing typos in a commit message.

Commits are local, so what should you do if you're worried about hardware failure? If you're working on a personal project, it may be acceptable to push this commit and later push the amended commit. You'll need the -f (--force) flag for the latter push. If you're working on a project with others, however, it would be bad practice to amend a commit that you've already pushed. Instead, you could create a temporary personal branch, commit your changes to this branch, and push it to the remote repository. Then, you could push the amended commit to this branch without worrying about rewriting anyone else's history and merge it with the main branch when you've finished fixing the issue.

Option 2: shelve your changes with git stash, which will sweep away both staged and unstaged changes, leaving you with a clean working directory. You can stash changes more than once. To see all stashes, use git stash list. To re-apply the most recent stash you made, use git stash pop. By default, git stash excludes new files (that haven't yet been staged) and ignored files. git stash is also useful when you want to see upstream changes made by someone else, but aren't ready to commit your work.

There's much more you can do with stashes: apply one stash to multiple branches, delete stashes you no longer need, stash parts of a file, etc. Stashes are always local; they can never be pushed to a remote repository. Atlassian has a good, detailed tutorial on git stash.

ECRYPT.EU

European Commission

This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 643161 and under CSA grant agreement No. 645421.